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Planar Conquest for Steam - State of Affairs

Hi guys,a lot of you have been wondering why there's no updates to Worlds of Magic and why there's not much going on in general. As you may already know, we are working on a relaunch for Worlds of Magic. This means we're reworking the game completely in a lot of ways. Most important thing to know is that the game will now be called Planar Conquest - as it's mobile counterpart, which has been released on February 2nd 2016 for iOS and will soon see a release on Android.

I want to underline that Planar Conquest on mobile platforms is NOT a dumbed down version of Worlds of Magic in any way. And the same is true for porting PQ back to Windows. Significant changes have been made to the game already and more is to be made. Those include:

1) getting rid of all the bugs that used to plague the game. Mobile version of PQ has been out for over a month now and the reception is very good. There's minor bugs that our programmers are fixing and patching on a regular basis but we've yet to encounter anything major (hopefully there's nothing major to find ,
2) improving the AI - since patch 1.2 the AI for PQ has been overhauled and improved a lot. We're getting positive feedback from players about the changes. We're still working on making it even better and polishing the balance of difficulties,
3) UI - for mobile PQ we have remade the whole interface of the game from scratch. As with above, we've yet to get any major complaints about it. People are of course suggesting some changes here and there and we're listening and improving the interface constantly. It's important to know that all the improvements are going to find their way to Steam version of the game. Also, I want to let you know that we're are not just moving mobile UI to the Steam version. We're are taking another look and changing what needs to be changes as we go, making sure that features that are important for PC gamers are in the PC version. That sometimes means going back to what worked in WoM, sometimes we need to redo this and that as a whole. In the mobile interface we have a good core, that we can work from,
4) game has been improved in terms of optimalisation a lot. Since we had to fit a huge strategy game on a phone, strides have been made to improve memory usage and the overall performance of the game,
5) there's been a lot of complaints about the world map graphics for WoM and we hear you. That's why we're taking another good look at it. From what I've seen, map is already looking great and already it reads a lot more than before. Fidelity of the assets is up as well.

For those of you that have felt that we abandoned WoM to go for mobile market money I just want to clarify that that is partially true. What I mean by that is that we could've worked on fixing WoM with little patches, sure. But we felt that if we want to make this right and fix WoM, we need to go back to basics and look at it with fresh eyes. Porting the game for mobile platforms was a good opportunity to do that. Money was also an issue, the harsh truth is that if we could not make some money back, we wouldn't be able to work on fixing the game for PC. We just had to take that road. Now we have a baggage of experience and progress ready to go. We're regular people too and and stepping back was important for our psyche as well. I can't emphasise enough how much easier it is to work on PQ for Steam now, that mobile version is received positively.

We are back to actual development cycle which means we have the game in a "work in progress" state. We have 2 programmers working on Planar Conquest at the moment. All in all there's 8-9 people working on and off on Planar. The aim is to have the game ready in Q2 but that is not set in stone. We are not rushing this time and want to make this right.

Every owner of Worlds of Magic will receive Planar Conquest for Steam for FREE, when it's released. That means the full game. After that, WoM will be discontinued. The overall goal is to achieve maximum harmonization between all PQ versions: mobile, Windows and consoles. Console version is being made with the help of Teyon. We are consulting with them, but it's mostly in their hands. In the long run, we want to at least be able to transfer saves between platforms.

In closing, I want to invite you to keep checking our Twitter account at:

We also have a great little community organising itself around PQ on the Touch Arcade forums, you're welcome to join or spy over there, to see what is going on with PQ's developement and check our progress.

Recently, a Q&A from one and only Troy Costisick has appeared on Explorminate. It contains some answers from our CEO, Leszek Lisowski - about the situation in Wastelands and what is up with Planar Conquest. Some questions have been posted in the comment section and as far as I know, we will try to answer them in some fashion so keep a look out for that.

When you release it on steam, I know you're giving us all free copies for owning WOM, but will that include the stuff that got sidelined as in-app purchases for mobile, or will we still have to buy all of that as optional DLC?

When you release it on steam, I know you're giving us all free copies for owning WOM, but will that include the stuff that got sidelined as in-app purchases for mobile, or will we still have to buy all of that as optional DLC?

WoM users will receive base game and the DLC that will allow them to use all eight races and all seven planes.

You posted on Kickstarter that DRM-free backers will finally be getting their backer copies a month or so after the Steam release (of course). OK, that's fine. We have an ETA now, and I can wait another few months. But what is your plan for the DRM-free release? How is it happening? What distribution platforms are you targeting? What's your backup plan? Basically, how are you going to make absolutely sure that you get us our copies this time?

According to WI's comments on the February 1st KS update, what happened last year was that GOG repeatedly rejected the game and you never explored any other options. There was never any status update, outreach, or offer of compromise, leaving your backers with nothing. We shouldn't have to keep coming after you about this. You need to commit to delivering to your backers.

Hi, Mentalepsy. Don't quote me on any of this because I'm gonna dive into the realm of some speculation right now.

I'd assume that when PQ is released on Steam, we will try to get the game on GOG again. Of course to do that, we need to actually make the game in the first place. Obviously we're aiming to make it much better than WoM was so Plan A is GOG. In case it doesn't pan out (let's hope it does though! ), there's always Plan B, that is: creating a stand alone version of the game for example. I can't say how that would be delivered, I'm not very versed in that stuff, but I'm sure our more tech-savvy guys would figure it out, so don't worry I know we let you DRM-free guys down and we're sorry about that. But since we already decided that we're gonna try to fix WoM in a major way (and since GOG wouldn't accept it, there clearly were things to fix), we just decided to rework the game first, then deliver it in it's proper form.

And that's fine. You've been clear that we'll get our copies when Planar Conquest is ready to go, and I can accept that. The problem is that GOG rejecting the game was not a good reason not to give us WoM, and I do not want to see that repeated with PC. There are many other large and small digital outlets who I'm sure would be happy to distribute PC even if GOG doesn't want it (or even if they do). Humble might take it, Gamersgate will sell anything, Fireflower and itch.io would probably love to have it, just to name a few. And of course there is the option of setting up a protected download yourselves if all else truly fails.

I want to be sure that the team is considering all of these options, because for Worlds of Magic, they seemingly did not. I think many of us were quite frustrated to hear that GOG was the one and only solution for us. Obviously GOG is the top drawer for DRM-free distribution and it seems you have a much better shot with them now, but if you still have problems with them, it isn't fair to make us wait indefinitely for GOG's approval.